The confusion between Violette Summer and Violette Szabo is understandable. They were alike in many ways. Both women lived in England, both had husbands who were killed in action in the early years of the war, and both were sent on undercover operations in France. But Szabo was French by birth, married a French soldier and had a daughter. Summer was born in Devon, her husband was an RAF pilot, and she had no children. Summer was also four years older (born 1917), her hair was not black but dark brown, and she was several inches taller than the diminuitive Szabo.
Violette Szabo was sent on two missions into occupied France and was captured in 1944 defending her comrades in the Resistance, was tortured horribly, was sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, and was finally executed with a bullet in the back of her skull on February 5th 1945. She was posthumously awarded the George Cross, the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de la Resistance.
Violette Summer's last mission was in 1943. We don't know what happened to her. Nobody knows. She sent her final message to London, and disappeared.
Some people say she was captured and killed by the Germans, and her body hidden so that she wouldn't become another martyr-figure. Some say she was executed by the Resistance, or by a traitor in the Resistance. Some say she was sick of all the killing and hid herself away until the end of the war. Some say she changed identity as part of a mission and never went back to being 'Violette Summer' again. Some say she went over to the side of the Nazis, or that she'd been a German double-agent all along, but the evidence for that is flimsy. Some say she's still alive. Some people are optimists.
I said that nobody knows for sure. More truthfully, if anyone knows then they're not telling... and they have held their secret for 65 years.
I'll talk about Violette's final message soon.
Wednesday, 30 April 2008
Thursday, 24 April 2008
Gold and codes
I was going to use this entry to talk about Violette Summer's brief and tragic life. But after the first post went live I've had so many emails about the magic words 'unsolved codes' and 'Nazi gold' that the plan's changed. Whether you're a newbie who's never heard the story of Violette Summer, or an existing fan who was asking about my take on the subject, here you go. And yeah, this is a subject I'll be returning to in later posts.
The coded message. Violette's last three transmissions from occupied France have never been decoded. We're not even sure how they were encoded: it looks like it was a poem-code, but Leo Marks of SOE had developed a system of disguising messages encoded with Worked-Out Keys to look like poem-codes ('Operation Gift Horse'), to waste the time of the German code-crackers. (His book Between Silk and Cyanide is terrific, even if he was with SOE). And the messages are only about 100 characters each, which is the right length for WOK: poem-codes were usually twice as long,
Secondly, nobody really knows what Violette Summer's last mission was. The Nova 5 records room was destroyed by a bomb in 1945, and nobody who knew her has ever given away her secrets. But there are stories that it had something – no, a lot – to do with finding out what the Nazis were doing with the gold that they'd looted. Many tonnes of that gold are still missing, unaccounted for.
Then add that agents were trained to set up caches, buried treasure-troves of emergency equipment, identity documents, money and, yes, gold. They'd return to these and dig them up if they had to drop their cover-identity and flee. One of Violette's unused caches from an earlier mission was found in the 1960s. So people think there may be more, and they may either contain gold or may point the way to the missing Nazi loot.
And thirdly, there's the question of what happened to Violette Summer. Nobody knows. She sent her three last messages and — just disappeared. The Germans were meticulous about recording every agent they captured but there's no arrest records, no last sightings by comrades in the resistance. Nothing. Nobody knows what happened to Violette Summer.
Like I said, I'll come back to this in future posts, and I'll also be telling you about the game and how it's going. But right now I need to work. Later!
The coded message. Violette's last three transmissions from occupied France have never been decoded. We're not even sure how they were encoded: it looks like it was a poem-code, but Leo Marks of SOE had developed a system of disguising messages encoded with Worked-Out Keys to look like poem-codes ('Operation Gift Horse'), to waste the time of the German code-crackers. (His book Between Silk and Cyanide is terrific, even if he was with SOE). And the messages are only about 100 characters each, which is the right length for WOK: poem-codes were usually twice as long,
Secondly, nobody really knows what Violette Summer's last mission was. The Nova 5 records room was destroyed by a bomb in 1945, and nobody who knew her has ever given away her secrets. But there are stories that it had something – no, a lot – to do with finding out what the Nazis were doing with the gold that they'd looted. Many tonnes of that gold are still missing, unaccounted for.
Then add that agents were trained to set up caches, buried treasure-troves of emergency equipment, identity documents, money and, yes, gold. They'd return to these and dig them up if they had to drop their cover-identity and flee. One of Violette's unused caches from an earlier mission was found in the 1960s. So people think there may be more, and they may either contain gold or may point the way to the missing Nazi loot.
And thirdly, there's the question of what happened to Violette Summer. Nobody knows. She sent her three last messages and — just disappeared. The Germans were meticulous about recording every agent they captured but there's no arrest records, no last sightings by comrades in the resistance. Nothing. Nobody knows what happened to Violette Summer.
Like I said, I'll come back to this in future posts, and I'll also be telling you about the game and how it's going. But right now I need to work. Later!
Monday, 21 April 2008
Replay Studios - live and kicking
Here at Replay we’re about half-way between the moment we announced we were doing Velvet Assassin, a video-game about secret agent Violette Summer, and the moment the game will actually go on sale. It’s a weird time. It’s exciting because the project is really coming together, and yet there’s still months of dev and testing before we go gold.
So this is a good moment to start filling in some backstory.
The announcement that we were doing a Violette Summer game was a little controversial. For a start, pretty much all the journalists immediately got her confused with Violette Szabo. Which is understandable, because people have been doing that since 1944. There’s no question that Szabo has the (deserved) reputation. She was an incredible, brave, heroic woman. But so was Violette Summer, even if the world doesn’t remember her as much, and that’s why we wanted to do the game.
So here’s the first difference. Szabo worked for SOE, the Special Operations Executive (not to be confused with that other SOE, Sony Online Entertainment). Summer worked for MI6, or SIS—the Secret Intelligence Service. SOE was technically part of MI6 (it was known as Section D) but early in WWII it was spun off into its own department. SOE and MI6 hated each other. Hated, hated, hated. They wasted an ludicrous amount of energy trying to screw each other over.
SOE’s mission was ‘espionage and sabotage’ in occupied countries. They were specifically about disrupting Nazi activity. It was an SOE team that blew up the heavy-water plant in Norway (and I’m still trying to persuade someone that there’s a fantastic game to be done about the race to develop the atom bomb.) Violette Szabo rebuilt resistance rings and organised sabotage raids in France. This kind of work put the German troops on higher alert. That made it much harder for MI6/SIS operatives to do their work, which was mostly covert intelligence-gathering.
That doesn’t mean that Violette Summer didn’t kill people when necessary. She did. She was extraordinarily good at it too.
In future updates I’ll talk more about Violette Summer, who she was and what she did, and how we’ve been working to make Velvet Assassin as faithful to her deeds and memory as possible, while still being a thrilling and original game. We’ve been talking to historians, experts and collectors. We’ve even borrowed a selection of Violette’s actual possessions and equipment, which will be 3D-scanned to become usable objects in the game. We think that’s pretty cool.
As for me I’m Victor Jones. I’m webmaster at Replay Studios, a bit of a WWII buff, and a longtime fan of Violette Summer and her legacy. I’ll be your guide. Hang around, this is going to be a very interesting journey.
So this is a good moment to start filling in some backstory.
The announcement that we were doing a Violette Summer game was a little controversial. For a start, pretty much all the journalists immediately got her confused with Violette Szabo. Which is understandable, because people have been doing that since 1944. There’s no question that Szabo has the (deserved) reputation. She was an incredible, brave, heroic woman. But so was Violette Summer, even if the world doesn’t remember her as much, and that’s why we wanted to do the game.
So here’s the first difference. Szabo worked for SOE, the Special Operations Executive (not to be confused with that other SOE, Sony Online Entertainment). Summer worked for MI6, or SIS—the Secret Intelligence Service. SOE was technically part of MI6 (it was known as Section D) but early in WWII it was spun off into its own department. SOE and MI6 hated each other. Hated, hated, hated. They wasted an ludicrous amount of energy trying to screw each other over.
SOE’s mission was ‘espionage and sabotage’ in occupied countries. They were specifically about disrupting Nazi activity. It was an SOE team that blew up the heavy-water plant in Norway (and I’m still trying to persuade someone that there’s a fantastic game to be done about the race to develop the atom bomb.) Violette Szabo rebuilt resistance rings and organised sabotage raids in France. This kind of work put the German troops on higher alert. That made it much harder for MI6/SIS operatives to do their work, which was mostly covert intelligence-gathering.
That doesn’t mean that Violette Summer didn’t kill people when necessary. She did. She was extraordinarily good at it too.
In future updates I’ll talk more about Violette Summer, who she was and what she did, and how we’ve been working to make Velvet Assassin as faithful to her deeds and memory as possible, while still being a thrilling and original game. We’ve been talking to historians, experts and collectors. We’ve even borrowed a selection of Violette’s actual possessions and equipment, which will be 3D-scanned to become usable objects in the game. We think that’s pretty cool.
As for me I’m Victor Jones. I’m webmaster at Replay Studios, a bit of a WWII buff, and a longtime fan of Violette Summer and her legacy. I’ll be your guide. Hang around, this is going to be a very interesting journey.
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